Do you work with a lot of PowerPoint presentation and want an easy way to collaborate or host an online meeting? Do you want to show your PowerPoint presentation to a group of people and simultaneously live chat on a webcam, turning through the slides, discussing parallely ?

Online Office suites like Google Docs, Zoho Office and Windows Live Skydrive are great for hosting office documents online. These service also offer collaborative features but the only thing missing is online conferencing when multiple people can voice or video chat simultaneously and flip through different slides of the presentation or word document.

Sure, you can host your PowerPoint presentation on Google Docs, invite all the members and start a voice or video chat in Skype or Gmail chat. But considering that Gmail chat, Skype is a separate app from Google Docs – presenters will have to toggle through multiple browser windows, which does not lead to a fast and fluent user experience.

This is where Slideshare fits in with its new online conferencing service called SlideShare Zipcast.

SlideShare Zipcast in a new online conferencing tool for PowerPoint presentation and word documents. The service runs directly from your web browser – no downloads or installation is required. Just upload your PowerPoint presentation, word documents, create a new meeting and invite all the members e.g Gmail contacts, Facebook friends or Twitter followers. There is no limit on the number of people who can join a web conference, talk to each other and see live videos of the members – streamed from their webcams.

When other members have joined in the conference, they can see your presentation, talk to you via an IM message or even start a group voice / video chat. This is extremely useful and much better than other online conferencing solutions who either are not well packaged or they lack features e.g lack of video support, limitation on the number of users etc.

The other advantage os that you can relay your conference messages on Twitter and Facebook. So if half a dozen team members are exchanging messages during the conference, you can post selected messages from the conference to your company’s Facebook fan page, Twitter account or blog. Sweet !

The free version of Zipcast is ad supported but allows an unlimited number of users to join any web conference. If you want more features e.g custom branding, removing the advertisements, password protection and a dedicated teleconference number, you can upgrade to any of the paid plans listed here.

Since Slideshare is already a well established company on PowerPoint presentations and online slideshows, launching a conferencing service around their existing application makes perfect sense.